At the evidence table, the physical specialist inspected the black metal case beneath a white examination light. The tamper strips no longer matched the handover record. Several numbered pages were missing from the transition copy, and an original seal that should have accompanied the case could not be located. The investigator placed the opened case beside the custody inventory and photographed the differences before touching anything further.
"Where is the original seal?" she asked.
Puit answered that the packaging had already been compromised when he reviewed it. His voice had the measured patience he had cultivated for thirty-five years. He did not say he had thrown away the damaged strip. He was careful now not to volunteer anything that could be checked immediately.
"That's not what I asked," the investigator said. "I'm asking where the original seal is now."
"I don't know."
She wrote down his answer. She did not raise her eyebrows or announce that she considered him dishonest. Puit had spent much of his career using other people's anger to make their allegations look less credible, and she gave him no anger to work with.
Theo Marchetti sat at a computer two desks away. He was in his thirties and looked like a man who had been interrupted during the first decent night's sleep of the week. He inspected the seized camera, read its model information, and asked who owned the associated fleet account. Nobody in the room answered immediately.
"Why are we assuming the memory card is the whole recording?" he asked.
Cara turned toward him. "There was a notification on Mr. Hargrove's phone when he was booked. Something about three clips being synced. I saw it before the phone went into the property drawer."
Theo looked at her. "What did the message say?"
"Ridley Fleet Secure. Three clips synced. I remember because I thought the department had given the car some kind of county access."
He checked the device's enrollment information and looked toward Naomi. "This model was configured for secure offsite retention. Local media is only one storage path. If the fleet account is operating normally, there may be completed encrypted recordings stored independently of the card."
Puit's face tightened. "Can the files be changed remotely?"
"We'll verify their integrity before relying on them," Theo replied. "But the local operator here doesn't appear to have permission to erase the archived copies."
The room went still in a way that no command had produced. Wade was standing near the wall with his arms folded so hard that his shoulders rose. His mind returned to the moment he had shut his cruiser door, watched the footage, and erased the local files. It had seemed like an ending at the time. Now it became only another event the investigators might be able to prove.
Naomi supplied the transition office's authorization for the vehicle's temporary fleet enrollment. The system had been installed after concerns arose about evidence records disappearing between collection and review. Lennox had agreed to use it when transporting the sealed material, but he had not received administrative access to the archive and could not alter its contents. That mattered because the investigators needed to distinguish independent evidence from anything the complainant might have controlled after the incident.